Nolan’s experiments in structure and perspective have always walked the fine line between immersive and obtrusive - nonlinear structures in general can sometimes feel portentous and contrived in the wrong hands - but good lord, he’s done it again. First viewing alone, this feels staggering, a towering work that builds off of both MEMENTO’s contrasted color and b&w storylines that collide into one another, and the multi-layered narrative threads of THE PRESTIGE, INCEPTION and DUNKIRK, here weaving together layers of time and space and sound and vision into one grand tapestry of a first-person cinematic experience. “Can you hear the music?” Kenneth Branagh’s character asks a young Oppenheimer - but he might just as easily have invoked a variation on TENET’s central creed: “Don’t try to understand it, feel it.” Oppenheimer can indeed hear, see, feel the music - just as we can, as Nolan burrows into the character’s subconscious to literalize and visualize his dreams and anxieties, only to then blend them with his external reality in ways both beautiful and terrifying. Early moments of his visions of dancing molecules and energy waves are downright transcendent while later scenes quickly turn nightmarish – the reverberating shaking space that envelopes him during heated moments, the blinding light he can’t escape, the merging of terror and triumph as the Los Alamos crew cheers but his attention is transfixed on the burning remains that the bomb has wrought (that silence during the cheering that’s then punctuated by individual select sounds – whew, maybe the most haunting sequence Nolan has put to film). “Your mind is the scene of the crime,” ran INCEPTION’s tagline but it could just as well be applied here. Interior and exterior life crash into one another and become so entangled that they’re indistinguishable, where physical space becomes malleable and charged with energy, primed to explode.

Major debt in all of this to Nicolas Roeg’s erratic nonlinear narratives, but probably even more so to Oliver Stone whose political works of the 1990s, JFK and NIXON in particular, worked within a similar melding of the objective and subjective in their deconstruction of 20th-century (practically mythological) icons and events, and that roared by in a fragmented collage of history, geopolitics, conspiracy theories, and courtroom drama at a bullet train speed. In fact, numerous stretches of OPPENHEIMER echo the manic intensity of the Donald Sutherland Mr. X sequence. The grinding, rocket fuel rhythm that Jennifer Lame’s edit achieves of interwoven narratives that build upon one another atop a constantly pulsating string and synth heavy score is just flat-out riveting. Editorially, it’s a whirlwind of sound and image that races forward with a relentless neurotic momentum that grows and expands and sometimes breaks into a frenzy. As a total contrast though, I’m also left remembering the recurring Malick-style focus on the simplest elements and movements of nature that roots the film in something tangible, textured and earthen – flowing water, sparks flying from fires, wisps of smoke and wind, the opening shot of ripples spreading out over the surface of puddles (one of the simplest, clearest demonstrations of cause and effect that begins a film that spends so much time dealing with consequence, responsibility, and chain reactions). “It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment,” Stephen Crane wrote of nature’s indifference to war in The Red Badge of Courage (although perhaps not quite so tranquilly in Oppenheimer’s concluding apocalyptic vision of nuclear war decimating the world).

That this is also so political and so unashamedly complex and thorny in a way that frustrates the lowest common denominator studio mentality is so completely gratifying – that’s par for the course with Nolan’s work of course but is still worth mentioning (also worth mentioning that I’m so thrilled audiences are lining up in droves for this). As a combination of the experimental macro narrative structure he loves and the more internal micro complexities and contradictions of the best of his character work, it’s mesmerizing and I can’t help but marvel at its construction. Talk to me in five years and I might tell you it’s his best film.